Ladies of the Wave

2013 Next Wave Festival

Brooklyn Academy of Music

Since 1983, the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival has sought to bring the most forward-looking performing arts to its stages. Dance has regularly been a part of that mix. This year's installment, which runs through December, includes 13 dance offerings.

Among the participants are two women who began making dances in the 1980s: Belgian-born Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker was first part of the 1986 Next Wave; Florida-born
Susan Marshall,
the 1988 festival.

In October, Ms. De Keersmaeker's group, Rosas, performed an ambitiously scaled two-work presentation at BAM's opera house. "En Atendant" and "Cesena" brought together for the first time two initially open-air, site-specific commissions from France's Avignon Festival. The pairing made for an event of much resonance, if sometimes flagging momentum. The former was named to suggest some of the dark history connected to the Avignon papacy; the latter, the site of a 1377 massacre instigated by the future Pope Clement VII.

The show's program notes point to inspirations drawn from the accompanying music, a 14th-century polyphonic vocal style known as "ars subtilior," as well as to the political and religious histories connected the Papal Schism of the music's era.

Presented by a cast of plainly dressed dancers and musicians mostly in black with colorful sneakers (costumes by
Anne-Catherine Kunz
) on a stripped-to-the-walls open stage set by
Michel François,
each work had both a sacred and a pedestrian air. At times the groupings and separate elements felt as if they were secret rituals; at others, as if they were formal activities springing simply from the point and counterpoint of the musical construction.

Ms. De Keersmaeker's choreography, which here mixed the presence of her musicians with that of her dancers, can create a gamelike effect say, of tag, but with a seriousness of focus and expression that prevents it from seeming merely playful. In "Cesena" she even had her cast take up each other's art at times, with her musicians dancing and her dancers vocalizing.

"En Atendant" was originally presented at twilight; "Cesena" just before dawn. At BAM, artificially re-created lights and darks evocatively shaded the presentation, but the effects didn't please everyone. One restive audience member spontaneously hollered out in exasperation for the lights to be turned on. Perhaps the Next Wave's nontraditional bent was new to him.

***

Meanwhile, in BAM's smaller Fishman Space last week, Ms. Marshall presented her "Play/Pause" for the first time. The hourlong work for a cast of six dancers, with three musicians isolated in the space's upper balcony, is described in the promotional material as a "mash-up of dance-theater and pop culture."

A mishmash would be more accurate.

Distinguished mostly by its casual-yet-elegant costuming by
Diana Broussard,
whose handsomely tailored designs dressed the two women and four men in delicate layers of whites, grays and blacks, "Play/Pause" promised effects reminiscent of the proceed/freeze feature on any number of audio-video devices. Mostly, instead, it suggested a skip-to-the-next-segment randomness.

David Lang's
specially composed music came and went with a variety of rhythms and aural textures alongside the dance theatrics. It rarely seemed to cue the action directly. One recurring action was the scraping or slamming of a hand microphone by the dancers over the surface of Andreea Mincic's set elements: Think of someone dragging his fingernails across a chalkboard for no reason other than to irritate.

Strips of gaffer's tape were stuck onto the surface of a moveable plywood board or on plexiglass panes that suggested small-scale teleprompter screens. Just what the specifically arranged and rearranged "dashes" of tape are meant to indicate—runic writings? remote-control symbols? scarification?—is anyone's guess.

The dancers' moves intermittently take shape as casual locomotion; as activities full of arm slashing and driven athletic frenzy; or as blasé, attitudinizing and stock dance moves like those of back-up dancers in a music video. One dancer,
Peter Simpson,
was the only performer who was not barefoot. With his gray hair and amplified take-charge spoken comments, he faded in and out with an avuncular presence. Penultimately and cloyingly, he conducted a kind of "breathe-with-me" exercise directly aimed at the audience.

The final image, capped by Mr. Simpson's uttering a sheepish "thank you" into his mic, was the one clear "pause" moment promised by the title, presenting the dancers lined up behind individually lighted plexiglass panes.

Whatever this pause's intention, it mostly resembled, inadvertently I presume, the iconic line-up from "A Chorus Line." It certainly gave me pause, though I suspect not for the intended reason.

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